Medical image modalities such as Computed Tomography (CT), Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI), and Ultrasound are capable of providing 3D views of a patient's anatomy. Increasingly, patients are scanned with more than one modality in the course of treatment—such as both CT and MRI—or with more than one sub-type of a modality—such as both T1-weighted and T2-weighted sequences for MRI. Some of the most recently developed medical imaging modalities provide for dual acquisition, such as Dual Energy CT (DECT), Positron Emission Tomography CT (PET-CT) and PET-MR. Even with a single scan acquisition, there can be multiple ways of viewing the data, including with different reconstruction kernels or with different visualization parameters (such as window/level). Physicians need these multiple acquisitions as different clinical tasks are better suited to—or in some cases require—the different modes of imaging. However, reading through all the different acquisitions available for a patient can be time consuming and thus expensive. In today's busy hospital or clinic, physicians need workflow aids that present them the most relevant data in the most efficient manner.
To date, there has been limited work on combining information from different scans for efficient display. In some cases, two types of data are combined with a complete overlay of the two images. The user is responsible for controlling the blend function of how much of the base image is shown versus how much of the overlaid image. Similarly all medical imaging workstations allow the user to do manual control of window/level.